Harrison Solow's Blog
RSS
Mar.13.2010
at the edge of the dance, he is courtly -
and the dance floor is eight thousand miles.
his politeness astounds in its measure
with its decorous, distancing smiles.
once i wished not to wish to behold him,
being "careful - lest wishes come true."
and he wished not to wish to betroth me;
held his...
Continue Reading »
3 comments
Mar.07.2010
We were planning to go - our invitation still sits on the desk in the "to be answered" pile. I guess I had better move it.
I love going to the awards. Some people who go regularly, find it a bore or pretend they do. I guess some people think it is cool not to admit that one finds...
Continue Reading »
7 comments
Mar.04.2010
Excerpt from a letter to a friend ~
My last neighbours in America were, I suppose, legendary. Those on my street were Linda Hamilton (and for about a year and a half, her husband, James Cameron), Cher, David Letterman (before he sold his house, one of several) and Bob Dylan, before he moved around...
Continue Reading »
6 comments
Mar.04.2010
"Once, while chopping garlic to the metronomic accompaniment of NPR, Charlotte switched stations, just in time to hear a Dr. Wayne Dyer say “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience,” a thought so profoundly relevant to her own way of...
Continue Reading »
11 comments
Feb.28.2010
A very small part of "a day in the life of" in an excerpt from a letter home after Saint David's Day, 2007, in Wales:
"It was St. David's Day yesterday - the National Holiday of Wales. There are many many activities one associated with this day, but among them are giving and receiving...
Continue Reading »
4 comments
Feb.13.2010
Pre-Publication Review of Harrison Solow's Felicity and Barbara Pym
Harrison Solow is a writer of experience at least as diverse as that of her principal voice in this unusual, charming and astringent piece of writing which some will read as an epistolary novel (no adjectival form of the term ‘e-...
Continue Reading »
6 comments
Feb.11.2010
In one of the sequels to Anne of Green Gables, the central character, Anne Shirley, mentions to her elders that she would like to live on her own when attending college and not in a dormitory (which in the 19th century was more like a convent) in order, as she put it “to have more freedom”.
The...
Continue Reading »
10 comments
Feb.04.2010
Awoke not me.
Left it. Where?
Mind safe...body?
Whose? Not mine.
Left it. Where?
Peace offering.
Whose? Not mine.
No subsitute.
Peace offering
Not wanted
No subsitute
For this body.
Not wanted,
This new thing.
For this body
Is not worth mine.
This new thing
Dropped, heavy,
Is not worth mine...
Continue Reading »
Jan.28.2010
The object of dissection, literary or otherwise, is to examine the parts of a whole, and to reassess them in the expectation that their sum will yield greater insight than the undefiled original. This undertaking, however, is not quite successful in confronting Anita Brookner's work, the...
Continue Reading »
5 comments
Jan.25.2010
Breaking the Berkeley Spell: 1980
In Nova Scotia, for the most part, women in self-scrubbed kitchens cut their own bread - soft, white slices, devoid of oat bran, zucchini, wheat germ, cilantro or fennel.
They make sandwiches for their windburnt children; bologna, without avocado, alfalfa...
Continue Reading »
Jan.23.2010
Alchemy or Testing Thirteen Perfumes
(I was asked to give impressions of different scents being created by a perfumer. These are the thoughts that arose from testing each one.)
1. Playing in the woods near a damp stone cottage, riverbound. A mossy memory of an old, old childhood. Almost forgettable...
Continue Reading »
5 comments
Jan.21.2010
A few years ago, in preparing a lecture on Jane Eyre for the second year students, I discovered that one of the critics on the novel had remarked thatJane Eyre had the best depiction of ‘cold' in all of English Literature, quoting a passage about the schoolgirls walking back to Lowood from...
Continue Reading »
2 comments
Jan.16.2010
Pace, which looks like “pacè” (peace) and is, or can be, belongs to interval rather than action. It divides and unites us - breeds, bears, and delivers what we are, what we do. There is pace in the momentum of disconnection - the synapse into which energy must leap or forever die.
The essence of...
Continue Reading »
2 comments
Jan.15.2010
How can there be a favourite poem? Milton, Dickenson, Browning, cummings, Arnold, Shelley, Frost, Donne, Eliot, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Plath, Thomas, Pope, Whitman, Blake, Ginsberg, Chaucer, Hopkins, Neruda, Williams, Spenser, Angelou, Byron, Pound, Coleridge, Roetke, Hildegard of Bingen......
Continue Reading »
"dazzling ... fills me with the most exquisite professional envy!"
”
—Thomas Vinciguerra, New York Times contributor & consultant, and editor, writer, critic for New Yorker, People, New York, The New York Observer, Newsday, Lingua Franca, GQ, etc.
About Harrison
Dr. Harrison Solow’s writing awards include the Pushcart Prize for Literature (2008). She is published by Simon & Schuster, The University of California Press, Harper Collins, Carpe Articulum, AOL, Cinnamon Press, AGNI, The Pushcart Press and several...
Causes Harrison Solow Supports
Lupus Foundation of America
Museum of Tolerance
Humane Society
Harrison’s Favorite Books
Our library consists of several thousand books. Favourite books span a wide range of genres, categories and eras. Among these are books of/on theology, art,...